Comment by buran77
4 days ago
The "memories" part can be trivially done locally and probably is, it's really just reading the picture's "date taken", so it's conceptually as easy as a "sort by date". My old Android with whatever Photos app came with it (not Google's) shows this despite being disconnected for so long.
There's nothing stopping either Apple or Google from giving users an option to just disable these connected features, globally or per-app. Just allow a "no cloud services" toggle switch in the Photos app, get the warning that $FEATURES will stop working, and be done.
I know why Google isn't doing this, they're definitely monetizing every bit of that analyzed content. Not really sure about Apple though, might be that they consider their setup with HE as being on par with no cloud connectivity privacy wise.
"memories" constantly given me notifications about "similar shots" at random, so I'm assuming it is trying to analyse the content of the photos. I managed to disable the notifications, but not the actual analysis
> The "memories" part can be trivially done locally and probably is, it's really just reading the picture's "date taken", so it's conceptually as easy as a "sort by date".
It’s more. It also can create memories “trip to New York in 2020”, “Cityscapes in New York over the years”, or “Peter over the years” (with Peter being a person added to Photos)